Forever Young

by Steven Carroll

  It’s the same (to say their best was back there, and so on), he muses, watching the downpour, as imposing drama and design on days that didn’t seem to have any at the time. A picture of things that those who weren’t there (and wish they were) impose upon a time and place that they’ve only ever read about. But to these people the question is of such importance that it almost demands to be answered in the affirmative: yes, they did do their best back then and back there. In that way the place and the time achieve a level of significance that they, these academics and commentators, have discovered, more or less, and which justifies all the time they’ve spent, no doubt, on their studies. The one necessitates the other. The academics study a period in the country’s art, pronounce it vital, and the artists of that time achieve fame. There’s something in it for everyone.

  There’s a reply to Sam’s letter in his coat pocket, and when the sky is drained his first stop will be the post office, a short stroll away. In the meantime he sits down at a café table and is approached by the owner who wishes him a good afternoon in Italian, then continues in fluent English. He is a sort of friend and one of the reasons why Art’s Italian never really improved after his first year here. He settles back in his chair looking out over the square, drenched in rain now, soon to be lit by a bright autumn sun, and smiles. This place is home now — his best measure of home being the place that you don’t want to be shot of.

  Whatever the city of his birth may have given him, it ceased to be home the moment he left. He left the city and the country in the same way that children eventually leave the family home, and the playgrounds, schools and sports grounds upon which they played and grew up, and never return. One morning they simply rise and leave because the day has come. And so, too, he left the place that made him, with no regrets, and never returned. Not even the odd visit. But gradually he started going back there in his mind and his work, and the re-creation of that time and that place became everything, so that, if required, that square of land that was once his city could be reassembled, street by street, building by building, brick by brick.

  But it is also the reason he can never return. For that three or four hours every morning in which he is transported back there would be lost to him if he did. The two things, what was and what is, cannot exist alongside each other. The one would cancel the other out — at least he fears it would. And he would lose his three or four hours every morning: that touch of heaven.

  A few years before, when this Whitlam — upon whom everybody pinned so much hope — came to power, he received letters and phone calls, urgent and joyous, telling him that he must return. That it was all different now. As if the whole country had just woken from a long, deep sleep and was only just discovering it was alive. Surprised by all the life it had in it, which had never been stirred, but which now was. Yes, it was all different now. He must return. It was even his duty to return. Our mountain has risen up from the flat land. Our moment is upon us. It is the only place to be.

  But he didn’t return. And all those old friends who wrote with urgency and joy no longer write or call. For as much as he could imagine them all dancing in suburban lounge rooms with the furniture pushed back against the walls, and at Sunday-afternoon parties in city parks, all risen from a long death-in-life sleep and responding like young animals to the life in them which they never knew was there, they nonetheless remained ‘them’, existing in some mythic form and in some mythic realm, in the country of his memory.

  During the ten or fifteen minutes it takes to ponder all this, the rain stops. He rises from the café table, waves to the owner and they part, for fun, in basic Italian. He speaks, he knows, like a tourist — a tourist who arrived thirty years ago and never left.

  The hills and valleys, by the time he walks back to the mill, have been transformed by the afternoon light. A gentle light, a glow, a quality of light he had never really seen until he first came here — and a quality of light, moreover, that made sense of all those paintings he had studied and which he had only ever seen in reproduction. It was a quality of light, he’d always assumed, that only ever existed in paintings, the way the glow in a photographer’s studio only exists in the studio. Until he came here and saw, for the first time, that the paintings were true.

  He is tired, and happily so, when he reaches the mill. And the house, upstairs and down, has the hushed air of a house that has been waiting for its owner to return. One that, over the years, has learnt to accommodate his routines. For Art lives alone. Best for him, best for everyone else. He was once married but he wasn’t very good at it. She was blonde and, he thought, beautiful, like a Hollywood actress, and he couldn’t believe his luck. They were young and they lived above a hat shop in a lane in that city far away. They painted and ate and made sophisticated love like Picasso and Dora, like Sartre and de Beauvoir. They took photographs, and over their year together compiled an album of those days. But slowly their luck ran out and they grew restless. And their restlessness took them away from each other. Every day, further and further. Until, one day, they went so far away from each other they never came back and the rooms above the hat shop that had been theirs were emptied of all the things that had been them, and somebody else moved in and made those rooms their own. Who first wandered so far away that they never came back? Does it matter now? And it was all for the good. Some people live best alone, and Art is one. He only makes life difficult for others if they come too close. And so his affairs over the years have come and gone and eventually ended with little hurt or damage to anyone. Or so he imagines.

  Somewhere among all the canvases, that collective portrait of the place stacked in his studio, is a painting of the hat shop they lived over. Meticulously reconstructed from memory: the hatter’s sign painted on the wall; the dark lane; the small, nineteenth-century doorway, made in the days when people were shorter; and the rooms above, one window open — the only sign that somebody lived there or once lived there being a small box camera sitting on the window sill. The same box camera with which they compiled the album of their days, when their luck was good, until their luck ran out and they became restless and their restlessness took them away from each other.

  And so, no good at marriage, he lives alone. And the affairs he’s had since then have come and gone like memorable dinners, fun while they lasted. But lately, and it’s a feeling that gradually crept up on him, he’s beginning to think of himself as being past all that, past the kind of love and desire that make people do silly and desperate things — past all that, like watching a sport you once played but don’t any more. All the same, a young woman, a Norwegian, a painter too, staying in the area, came to visit recently. And at some point in their talk, for she had come to see his work and for the conversation, because these hills and valleys can be lonely, he realised he was talking quickly. Even a little theatrically. Almost a sort of performance. And he realised he was trying to impress her. And, at the same time, realised that the young woman was oblivious to this. Soon after, she left. All she saw, no doubt, was not so much an old man as an oldish one. Thinning hair, grey goatee. Someone who might once have looked like a young Toulouse-Lautrec, but didn’t any more. We forget, he muses, for our bodies grow old while our minds stay young. Or, at least, we continue to think of ourselves as young. And from time to time a young mind forgets itself and speaks from an old body.

  Outside the kitchen window, downstairs in the courtyard, the birds are gathering. The cat watches. The sun lowers in the sky. The shadows lengthen. Leaves, yellow and red and curled, occasionally fall. Afternoons, seasons and years have passed, in ever-repeating cycles, by this window. Watch it often enough, watch it all come and go often enough, and one day you realise that you’re not just watching the cycle, you’re part of it. It’s a clarifying thought to Art, this confirmation that things will end then go on without him. And one that always comes to him at this time when the afternoon lengthens. And far from having a negative effect, it lifts him. Almost comforts him.

  The painti
ng of the hat shop is downstairs in the studio with all the others. He hasn’t looked at it for a long time. It is one part of this jumble of things stored there. Most of which nobody has ever seen. Which, at the moment, he prefers. And when Sam comes to visit in the winter (an odd time to be visiting), should he show him? If he asks? But, then again, Sam was never one to show a great deal of interest in what anybody else was doing. Conversations with Sam were nearly always about Sam, and what Sam was doing. Which used to annoy Art, but which now suits his purposes. No, there will be little talk of what Art is up to. For Sam, he is sure, all the years in between notwithstanding, will not let him down.

  Art strolls downstairs to his garden and waters the pots and shrubs in the afternoon sun. And when he is finished, he strolls out to the road, the watering can dripping the last of the water, and stands by the roadside.

  In that village, on the hill on the other side of the valley, Amerigo Vespucci, the locals will tell you, was born and raised. And one morning, one green morning in 1491, Amerigo Vespucci set off from that village in search of the New World, occasionally distracted, no doubt, by the wild boar, deer and infinite variety of birdlife that inhabit these hills and valleys, along the way.

  PART TWO

  November, 1977

  6. The Last New Wave

  ‘You’ve made surprising friends in high places.’

  Michael has not seen Peter since their student days. The hair is shorter, the beard gone. The face a little fuller, but not much. And, no doubt, Peter observes the same of Michael. The years touch us slowly. If Michael passed Peter in the street he would know him. Besides, he has seen him from time to time in the newspapers, for Peter’s legal career, his courtroom jibes, were well publicised. He was someone to watch. On the way up. He had that unmistakeable air of expectation. But you don’t hear that sort of talk much now. He abandoned his legal career and not so much moved to Canberra as disappeared into Canberra, as, no doubt, countless bright young things had before him. Presumably, Michael muses, he tells himself that things have stalled for a while, and that it’s only a matter of time before someone finds the right seat for him and all that expectation can become reality.

  He talks briefly about Canberra, just so Michael understands that he does know all about high places: how the minister thought such and such and the PM thought otherwise. And how somebody senior in government will soon have to retire unexpectedly, but he can’t possibly say who. Michael stares at him, saying nothing. Why has Peter contacted him after all this time? Certainly not to talk about Canberra.

  It’s the business of surprising friends and high places that he wants to talk about. Recently Michael wrote a story for a newspaper, the paper they all read. Even if it is dismissed as a bit left-wing for conservative readers, they still read it. For it is also considered the intellectuals’ paper. Michael’s story had appeared the previous week. It had simply been a writing exercise to Michael and he had sent it off not really expecting it to be printed and not really caring if it wasn’t. Something to possibly make him a little money for the coming trip. Nothing more. In it he described the prime minister as the Macbeth of Australian politics. Mr Whitlam was a combination of Duncan and Banquo, and that compound ghost, Michael imagined, had haunted the prime minister from the moment he took power, so his time in office had been given over to assuaging that guilt.

  But it wasn’t just guilt, there was the odd matter of wanting to be respected as well. The massive victory in 1975 aside, this patrician, this Western District Macbeth, Michael speculated, couldn’t shake off the disturbing feeling that the people, while endorsing him, didn’t respect him, and instead believed that in seizing the crown so impatiently he had played most foul for it. He was the man who had grabbed power, rather than waiting for it to fall to him naturally, like ripe fruit. And the prime minister didn’t like this, or so Michael imagined. He didn’t expect to be loved, nor did he want to be. But there was the question of humanity and the peoples’ respect for his humanity. For no king wants to be seen as merely good at being ruthless; that is respect of the most basic nature. The king has to live with himself, after all. And the king cares what the people think, Michael speculated, because if they think well of him for long enough, and people write about him often enough in such terms, that benevolent image of him might one day become so fixed in people’s minds that it becomes the truth. The way history records you. Not what you are, but the way people see you. And did the people see the new king as lacking humanity? Or having too little humanity, in the same way as they saw the old king as having too much humanity: too much fallible humanity? It is a kingly concern, Michael went on to say, and one that much troubles the king because it goes to the heart of such matters as integrity and the value of one’s name. And so the king, much troubled, has sought to assuage his guilt.

  It seemed like an amusing enough idea, one that wedded the everyday to the timeless storyland of myth and could be told in a more or less playful way, in the manner of a speculative game — and in such a way that it became clear to the reader that the author wasn’t so sure he believed it himself. It was all a sort of fiction: essay as fiction, and fiction as essay. But Michael is already discovering that the two can liberate each other by introducing that element of playful speculation to things. Of course, he never expected anybody to take it seriously, and it surprises him that Peter seems to have taken it more seriously than he did. And this, it seems, is why Peter summoned him up from the past.

  They are sitting at an outdoor café on a calm spring morning in their old student area: an area that was always a sort of Little Italy, an area where the ghosts of Michael and Madeleine are forever carrying steaming pizzas back to Michael’s room, and which is now, more and more, a little Europe.

  ‘You struck a chord in surprising places.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, inside the palace, the king is seen as having all this power, and doing nothing with it. Some of my associates like your style.’

  Michael smiles. ‘Meaning?’

  Peter stares out across the street, watching a delivery van full of bread and pastries being unloaded. ‘Meaning that, from time to time, you might like to write a few things for us.’

  ‘What!’

  Peter’s gaze returns to Michael. ‘Oh, just the odd speech here and there. And no names, of course. We can’t have you losing your friends. But there’d be some handy pocket money for an aspiring scribbler.’

  Michael shakes his head, a disbelieving smile across his face. ‘I might sink to the bottom eventually, but I’m not going to start there.’

  ‘You’re not Faust and I’m not the devil. And this is no great matter.’

  ‘No.’

  Peter smiles and pulls a card from his wallet. ‘Here, take this anyway.’

  Michael takes it, telling himself that it’d be petty not to, and gives it a quick glance. He has never had a card and can’t imagine ever having one. But here is Peter’s, proclaiming him an ‘advisor’ in the ministry of something or other. No doubt he has acquired all sorts of entertaining small talk over time, the likes of which Michael has just heard, to be trotted out at dinners and drinks and what-not. But it must be a bit of comedown all the same, for he was once earmarked for bigger things.

  Michael puts the card in his pocket, at the same time beginning to realise that you can never really be sure who is reading you or, indeed, how they are reading you. They both look out over the street in silence.

  ‘You come back here much?’ Peter eventually asks.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nostalgia already?’

  ‘No, I just like it.’

  ‘Ever go past the old house?’

  ‘Sometimes. More accident than anything.’

  Peter nods, looking round. ‘I’ve never been back.’

  There is another brief silence, and Peter finishes his coffee with a slight frown.

  ‘It’s impossible to walk past,’ Michael says, ‘without thinking about Pussy Cat … Louise.�
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  It is an aside, just a bit of thinking out loud, but Peter suddenly swings back to Michael as if having heard the tolling of some giant bell. And he could almost be waiting for the ringing to die down before he speaks.

  ‘You think of her?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Often?’

  ‘Not often, but I think of her. You?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  There is a pause, Peter seemingly engrossed with the unloading of pastries from the van.

  ‘I know it shouldn’t matter that she was beautiful,’ Michael says, ‘but it does.’

  They were all just a bit or a lot in love with Pussy Cat; it was impossible not to be. But as much as she was born to be loved, Michael wonders if she ever was. And while part of him will always mourn the day that her body was carried from the house, there is another part that recognises that the world was always too much with her and too much for her. That in death she was safer, and that neither Peter’s jibes (which he heard all too often from his room next to theirs in those last days) nor anybody else’s could touch her now.

  ‘I’ll always remember that last night … sitting with her in the doorway, on the landing. She looked like she’d just been thrown into the world and landed on the doorstep. And I mean really thrown. Into this strange, baffling world. Eyes wide. No idea what the rules were. I tried to talk to her, but she wasn’t listening. And then she said, “I’ve lost my pills.” I didn’t even realise she had pills.’